Category: Psychology

There are thousands of websites and self-help books dedicated to helping artists (and wanna-be artists) find the inspiration required to become the next great writer, painter, musician …

The Ancient Greeks believed that goddesses (called muses) were the inspiration for most art and went as far as to offer supplication in return for being in their favour. In a recent Ted talk, Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of the best-selling travel memoir Eat, Pray, Love, reintroduced this idea when she suggested that some kind of force outside of the the artist is at least partially responsible for the act of creation. As an example, according to Gilbert, Tom Waits was driving on a freeway when a great melody came into his head. He was unable to write it down but was afraid to loose it so he appealed to the muses: “Excuse me. Can you not see I’m driving? Do I look like I can write down a song right now? If you really want to exist, come back at a more opportune moment … otherwise go bother somebody else today. Go bother Leonard Cohen.” According to Gilbert, at this moment Waits entered into a new relationship with his creativity that was “peculiar, wondrous, bizarre collaboration and conversation between Tom and the strange external genius that was not Tom.” (source)

in fairies, muses or an external divinity, a more practical alternative to mystical intervention is that our subconscious minds have the potential to act on our conscious desires and motivations. The New York Times article Who’s Minding the Mind highlights numerous studies that show that “once covertly activated, an unconscious goal persists with the same determination that is evident in our conscious pursuits.” (source)

There are many examples of artists who say that complete or nearly complete masterpieces came to them while they were asleep, including:

Samuel Taylor Coleridge claims that Kubla Khan came to him in its entirety in an opium induced dream. According to the writer’s own account, when he woke up he began fervently composing line after line of poetry until he was interrupted by a visitor. After returning to the work he struggled to complete the rest of the poem because he could not remember the rest of the lines. Critics on the whole say that Kubla Khan is unlike most of Coleridge’s other work. (source)

According to his own account, Robert Louis Stevenson’s inspiration for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde came to him in a dream: “For two days I went about racking my brains for a plot of any sort; and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene afterward split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers.” (source)

The melody for Yesterday, the most covered Beatles song in their entire catalog, came in its entirety to Paul McCartney in a dream. It came to him so completely that for months he was convinced that he’d plagiarized it and would play it for friends and record executives to try to determine its origins before finally accepting it as his own. (source)

In her introduction to the 1931 edition of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley “revealed that she got the story from a dream, in which she saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with a uneasy, half vital motion.” (source)

In the above video, 75% of the people tested failed to notice that the person they were talking to was swapped with a different person during their conversation. In a similar experiment conducted by Derren Brown, about 50% of people failed to notice that a person asking them for directions was

We also experience some form of ‘blindness’ on a very small scale. Our brain performs something called Saccadic Masking during certain types of fast eye movements (saccades), where our vision is massively impaired during the movement, but our brain uses before and after snapshots to hide the fact that we were unable to clearly see during the movement – in effect, it is hiding the useless blurred image of movement from us.

You can see this in action with a simple experiment. Grab a friend and a mirror. Look into the mirror, and stare at one eye, then switch to the other, then back again. You won’t be able to see your eye movement (your brain is masking it), but your friend will.

This spooky sound is sampled from a Numbers Station. Hundreds of these shortwave radio stations exist around the world, transmitting numbers, letters, beeps and simple tunes. Their origin – and ongoing transmissions – still largely remain a mystery.

Are they secret codes and directives for spies in foreign countries? Are they sources of misinformation to distract the enemy? Perhaps messages between druglords? Hoaxes by amateur enthusiasts? The answer is probably: yes, all of these, and more besides.

The Conet Project sampled 150 transmissions from 20 years and released them on a 4CD set (“Not available in stores!“, I suspect). This is currently “out of stock”, but the recordings are also available on archive.org, should you wish to disturb yourself some

The werewolf myth is one that has become iconic in popular culture. There are dozens (at least) of films about the full moon turning human beings into monsters from An American Werewolf in Paris to the classic from the 1950s, The Curse of the Werewolf. The legend of the werewolf can be traced back deep into literature and myth from around the world. In The Metamorphoses, Ovid writes of King Lycaon who is changed into a werewolf by the gods after eating tainted meat.

Although there is some evidence to suggest that full moons might cause changes in human behaviour, it buy viagra online is mostly anecdotal and too sporadic to be considered factual. For example, in 1978 a study called Human Aggression and the Lunar Synodic Cycle found that in “11,613 cases of aggravated assault in a 5-year period: assaults occurred more often around the full moon.” (source)

More recently, in 2007, Sussex police announced that they found a correlation between the incidence of violence among drinkers in the seaside town of Brighton.

“I compared a graph of full moons and a graph of last year’s violent crimes and there is a trend,” Inspector Andy Parr told the Brighton Argus newspaper. “People tend to be more aggressive generally. I would be interested in approaching the universities and seeing if any of their post-graduates would be interested in looking into it further. This could be helpful to us.” (source)

It should be noted that “in separate findings, [the Brighton] police also found that violence in pubs and nightclubs increased on paydays.”

You live the same distance away from two cities and decide to go shopping – which do you go to; the one with the most stores, right? What if you didn’t live the same distance away from each city – how far would you

the Break Point (BP) [from city p2] is equal to the Distance (d) between two places, divided by the following: 1 plus the Square Root of, the size of Place One (p1) divided by the size of Place Two (p2). (slightly paraphrased from the previous Wikipedia link)

The “size” of a place is a little arbitrary, but you could use figures such as the total square-footage of retail space, or the total number of unique stores. Either way, this data is fairly difficult to track down.

Luckily, ubiquitous stores like Starbucks are a good indicator of the larger retail environment, so we can use their UK Store Locator to count the total number of Starbucks stores in each city, and use this as a good estimate for ‘Retail Size’.

Obviously the Break Point figure, in miles, will be larger for the cities that are further away from London, such as the Scottish cities. Therefore a more interesting statistic is the Break Point distance in terms of percentage of the total distance (the green line in the graph above). This demonstrates the relative ‘pull’ of each city, influenced by the number of Starbucks (which, remember, we’re using to represent the total number of stores). Looking at these figures, we can see how the lack of Starbucks in Liverpool is causing a relatively low ‘retail pull’ towards the city, whereas the additional Starbucks stores in Manchester give it almost the same relative ‘pull’ as the much farther away Edinburgh.

Just because I had the data, here’s a bonus graph of People per Starbucks for each city: